Tiger Barb Concept - Light Fighter

[bszlrd]

You mean the intruded canopy? I usually do it this way:
- First the main shape, without any identation or anything. It should have even geometry usually, I try to avoid too elongated surfaces.
- Then with the knife tool (K) I go around and cut up the boundary of the canopy glass. I cut up the small structural bits too (see the Bowfin canopy). If ngons ar created by this, then I cut them up to triangles/quads, just to keep it clean.
- I select all the canopy faces, then hit E for extrusion, but I press esc or right mouse, so the extracted faces jump back to where they were.
- Now their normals are still aligned outwards, so with alt+s I can move the faces along them, to create the small inturion needed.
- If you need to adjust the depth later, then you can use alt+s on all vertices except the voundary ones, those need to be slid along the edges with gg, or the 90degree angles will be smoothed.

For,the nase cockpit shape, I usually go around with the knife tool on the fuselage to cut up, where the canopy area meets the hull, then extrude and alt+s or gg away. Or create the cockpit as a separate but intersecting mesh, with geometry that lines up with the goumetry of the fuselage where they meet. Then, usually with gg, or transformations snapped to faces, I line them up preciesely, then delete the unneded faces, and weld up the border vertices.

Hope this helps. :) Not sure if I worded it properly. If it's incomprehensible, I can make a video of it tomorrow.

[bobtheterrible]

Thanks nozmajner,

I think Im good with intruding the canopy glass - although I think your technique is better than mine :)

Embarrassingly, the bit I was struggling with was the creation of the dome of the canopy. I was having trouble getting it smooth i.e. all the verts evenly lined up.

Or create the cockpit as a separate but intersecting mesh, with geometry that lines up with the geometry of the fuselage where they meet. Then, usually with gg, or transformations snapped to faces, I line them up precisely, then delete the unneeded faces, and weld up the border vertices.

Ah ok this is where I had go to... its good to know that Im not missing some basic technique - Im just not very good at it! :O) More practice, practice practice.....

transformations snapped to faces

This sounds new to me... could you elaborate??

Cheers
Bob :)

[bszlrd]

You can select face as snaping target nex to the little magnet icon. Then you can snap the verites of the canopy area to the surface of the fuselage for example.
You could also try the boolean modifier, but that might need some cleanup afterwards, it can be quite unpredictable.